Sorry Gray Rooster, when I saw that 99.9999% of physics was easy I sort of snapped, and failed to discover your subtle humour. When one's ire is up his common sense is gone. I thought mine was pretty subtle, and I've made a few enemies of people who didn't understand it and mistakenly thought I was insulting them.

I never found physics easy. I've gotten rid of my copy of Eyring, (later a Mormon elder), Walter and Kemble's 'Quantum Chemistry' that was known familiarly as the green diamond. Green was the color of the cover, and it was very, very hard. [My research director in college (later director of the Mellon Institute, who combined it with Carnegie Tech) and had post-doct'd with Pauling at Cal. Tech, told me that Pauling had once gone to Utah to visit Henry Eyring to talk science, but Eyring had used the whole time trying to convert Pauling into becoming a Mormon.

Pauling and Wilson's 'Quantum Mechanics' wasn't easy, but with perseverance I could make it through their treatments. I knew both authors slightly and couldn't understand why E. B Wilson never got a Nobel prize (contrary to popular conception there's a bit of politics in those; any self advertizing instantly kills your chances, and you have to get recommended by the right people to get on the list of possibles). His son went into research in a different area and became what is probably the youngest Nobel winner ever. Wilson started out with World War II surplus radar equiptment, and did a lot of great microwave spectroscopy, but Walter Gordy and Art Shallow did a lot of the development, too. Art Shallow later got a Nobel prize for work one of his grad students-later post doc did, but it was really in recognician of his earlier work in microwave spectroscopy and his invention of the maser, which was later translated from the microwave frequency domain into the optical freqency domain to become the laser.

I should confess that I don't have a Ph. D. in physics. It was in physical chemistry, but when I applied to NBS I was told they didn't have any openings for physical chemists but Earle Plyer had opened aposition for a physicist before he went off to Europe on sabbatical for a year, and with my unusual background in electronics (for a chemist that is) I should reapply as a physicist. That's how I got to be a physicist. [Life seems to be a bewildering series of accidents] Needless to say I had to do a lot of out of hours studying to get to be a real physicist. I'd had electonics as a hobby since about age 15, building AM radios (and fixing the neighbours), phonographs (nylon plastic broom bristles made great needles), small transmitters, etc. Jim Russell (inventor of the CD) was always better at that kind of thing than I was (but his family had some money and he didn't have to build everything out of junk. His wife Barbara was the only other one in my junior high school class who wanted to be a chemist, which she still does on a consulting basis, when her beloved viol lets her). At any rate I took senior level electronics courses in college, and though my BS was in chemistry I had a solid minor in EE. (In junior college an engineering prof had told me to forget the EE bit, that didn't mix with chemistry, advice I fortunately ignored). It was pretty funny in the advanced electricity course in the Physics Department at UW. (I never liked that instructor much, who I again had for classical mechanics. He didn't go for straight forward treatments of topics, but always had some trick mathematical transformation to get the answer to a different problem, then by a different transformation got that one back into the starting problem). I was far from the top in the physics treatment of electricty, (and still have to struggle with electro-magnetism) but the geniuses all came to my setup in the lab to find out how to get the wires connected to the right boxes, in order to do the experiment.